Remembering Rheo Blair Part II: John O'Connor, Close Friend and Chief Assistant

I met Rheo Blair in the summer of ’69. I was seven years old
at the time and sitting in a pew at St Brendan’s Catholic Church observing my
sister and her fiancé rehearsing for their wedding when intothe church walked
Rheo,

Rheo surrounded by John's family at their home in 1972

shoulders squared, wearing a bright yellow shirt, as I recall, and
carrying a great big camera. As it turned out, my sister’s fiancé and his
brother both worked for Rheo and Rheo magnanimously agreed to be one of the two
wedding photographers. Then I remember
at the wedding reception that was held at our house on south Harvard Avenue in
Los Angeles seeing Rheo there again, this time with his Champion juicer, set up
in our living room, serving strawberry ice cream! The fact that it was his special
high-protein ice cream didn’t matter to me at the time; the fact that it was
ice cream did (!) and it was at that moment that Rheo became my new best
friend.

I still remember that ice cream as being quite delicious, because I remember going back for seconds and thirds and fourths…although when I reminded Rheo of that time years later he laughed and said he didn’t think that it was the best batch he’d ever made. But to a kid who loved ice cream, eating Rheo’s ice cream on that hot August summer day was a real delight and I recall it as if it was yesterday. Rheo quickly became a dear friend of my family, not really because of the ice cream (although, speaking for myself, it certainly helped!), but because of the man that he was and the invaluable nutritional advise that he provided to members of my family, especially my mother, who was experiencing some pretty serious health problems at that time.
I also remember the first time I went over to Rheo’s house
on Rosewood Avenue. I went with my parents and brothers. When we arrived at the
door we had to remove our shoes, because Rheo’s house had wall-to-wall white
carpeting. This was a new and rather fascinating experience for me. We all ate
protein ice cream that night too and Rheo played W.C. Fields movies on his home
projector until dawn (Rheo was a real night owl!). I had never seen a W.C.
Fields movie before and recall turning to my parents at one point and,
referring to W.C. Fields, saying “Where’s this guy been!” as I never laughed so
hard in my life.

Although Rheo was a well-known nutritionist in his day and a
true pioneer in the field of nutrition, he was also a man of multiple talents. He
loved photography and was actually quite good at it; many of his famous before-and-after
pictures as well as other publicity pictures were taken by Rheo himself, at
least in the early years. In fact, the only moving footage of my family in
existence was taken by Rheo himself at my brother’s graduation from Marine boot
camp. Moreover, he could also sing and do it well, in a baritone style
reminiscent of the late, great Nelson Eddy. He could even play a little piano
too, although as a non-musician who lacks the musical knowledge, I couldn’t
rate him on this, other than to say he sounded pretty good to me. Moreover, he seemed
– to me, anyway – to know his bible and, although he did not belong to any
particular religion during the time I knew him, would on occasion cite
scripture in a manner reminiscent of Billy Graham.

Rheo dabbled in so many things. This included doing a little
body building himself as a young man – although he knew this wasn’t ultimately
for him. He was a man who knew his limitations as well as his strengths. But I
am convinced that, although nutrition was the career path he ultimately chose,
with his positive attitude and willingness to work hard he could have chosen a
number of different paths and been successful at it.

John working out in Rheo's home, 1983

Rheo was really ahead of his time in many ways, including when
he opened his own gym in downtown Chicago back in the late ‘40s. It included a
kitchen along with state-of the-art equipment as well as it provided a venue to
sell his and other dietary supplements. He was primarily interested in
nutrition, but with targeted exercise. Moreover, he continued to work with body
builders, because he knew that they made up a key segment of his target audience and they weren’t afraid to experiment with new things, be it exercise
techniques or the protein and other dietary supplements. This arrangement worked
out well for Rheo’s fledgling business. They also modeled for his Tomorrow’s Man magazine he published in
which he advertised his supplements.

Rheo was also a motivational speaker and I think that, by
design, he incorporated motivational tools into the nutritional program. As a
disciple of the motivational authors and speakers Earl Nightingale and Napoleon
Hill, Rheo was a big believer in the power of positive thinking and believed
that in a free society such as ours a positive attitude coupled with hard work
would invariably lead to success, be it financial, spiritual, or what have you.
Moreover, Rheo felt that many of the young kids he met during his time as a
nutritionist not only had nutritional deficiencies that needed to be addressed
but also had very negative attitudes, which could be a factor in why too many
turned too drugs. So, although many didn’t know this about Rheo, he very often included
listening to tapes of motivational speakers like the aforementioned and others,
like Reverend Ike, to work synergistically with the nutritional phase and yield
better results. I can even recall one time when Rheo took some young students
of his and me to listen to Reverend Ike speak out at the Santa Monica
Convention Center. I found it to be a riveting experience.

Another thing about Rheo that I’ll never forget is how much
he loved science and technology. He was an extremely curious man and was always
anxious to learn new things and buy the latest technological gadgets to hit the
market. The fact that he had little formal education of his own may have stirred
in him a real thirst for knowledge that continued to the day he died. I even
recall when I went to see him in the hospital after he had been diagnosed with
kidney failure how utterly fascinated he was with the dialysis machine and how
it had “saved my life.”

Rheo’s attitude toward technology was quite telling, for it
was very different than the sort of attitudes he told me he witnessed as a boy
growing up in rural Somerville, New Jersey. He told me his father was one of
the first people in their area to purchase an automobile and that there were
closed-minded people at the time who referred to his father’s car as the
“Devil’s mobile.” Rheo detested this sort of closed-minded, anti-science
attitude and wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

As a big music lover, he used to recall his early days
working in Chicago when he owned his own recording studio. I think he would
have been great at it if he had pursued it, but God obviously had other plans
for him. However, one example of Rheo’s fascination with technology was when he
went out and purchased the first-generation walkman when it first hit the
market and was just beside himself at the quality of the sound coming from what
at that time was such a small unit. For a man who was working with reel-to-reel
recording equipment back in the ‘40’s, this was no doubt a quantum leap and
Rheo couldn’t get over it.

Of course, it was Rheo’s own poor health that inspired him
to get into nutrition in the first place. He told me that he was once diagnosed
as the most anemic boy in that part of New Jersey where he grew up. Rheo was
very sickly as a boy and said that his mother was suffering with an active case
of what he called “infantile paralysis” (polio) while pregnant with him. But he
said he used to listen from his home in New Jersey to Dr. Carleton Fredericks’s
radio show that aired out of WOR in New York City and how this raised him out
of ignorance. He praised Dr. Fredericks greatly as his mentor, acknowledging
that so much of what he knew about nutrition came from listing to this
nutritional pioneer.

Rheo suffered with, among other things, severe hypoglycemia,
which he told me impared his ability to think clearly and concentrate in school.
This led him to seek relief by experimenting with many different types of
diets, including veganism/vegetarianism, which was very popular among the
“health nuts” of the day. But he said the first diet that he noticed really
helped him was the Bernard McFadden “Milk Diet.” After this, along with becoming
a disciple of Dr. Fredericks, Rheo was on the path to adopting the high-protein,
animal-based diet as the dietary basis for his nutritional program.

I think Rheo would agree that he was not the most organized
individual in the world. But I got the sense that this was, at least in part,
because he tried to do too much of everything himself. He should have delegated
more responsibilities to others, particularly when it came to the private
nutritional counseling. Rheo always insisted on doing it himself, even though
there was such a demand for people to see him and he couldn’t possibly handle
them all one-on-one. This didn’t stop him from trying. At a certain point,however,
when the load simply became too heavy, he did start referring some prospective
clients to Dorothy North for nutritional counseling. She was the mother of child
television star Jay North of Dennis the Menace fame, was a believer in Rheo’s
nutritional philosophy, was very knowledgeable herself, and a well-respected
nutritionist herself at the time. I would later work under her in the vitamin
department at Quinn’s Health Pantry, which was the state-of-the-art health food store in Los Angeles back in
the ‘70s and ‘80s, before Mrs Gooch’s (later purchased by Whole Foods) came
along.

Rheo H. Blair influenced my mother and me greatly. My mother
told me that she used to scoff at my sister for taking a vitamin C pill, but
that when her health was failing her and she was losing so much weight because
she couldn’t hold any food down she relented and tried Rheo’s protein powder
and that it was the first time in a long time she was able to hold any food
down. My mother went on to fully recover her health and became a disciple of
Rheo’s and a real believer in the power of “super nutrition.” Moreover, I
myself learned so much from Rheo and found myself reading the books he
recommended, such Food Facts and
Fallacies and Low Blood Sugar and You,
both by Dr. Carlton Fredericks, and Super
Nutrition by Dr. Richard Passwater. After Rheo passed away, I worked
various jobs as a laborer before my mother got me a job working at Quinn’s
Health Pantry where she was working. I honed my nutrition skills working in
health food stores and eventually went back to school to earn my degree in
nutrition. Clearly, Rheo had a profound impact on the career paths my mother
and I chose to take.

Another thing I’d like to stress about Rheo was how very open
minded he was. Although he was passionate about what he believed in, he was
always willing to listen to an idea, even if it was counter to what he believed.
And he even found himself changing his views on occasion, including his
nutritional views. I remember, for example, how Rheo used to be opposed to
drinking beer, before coming to advocate its consumption with meals, in small
amounts. Another example of how Rheo could change his position concerned his
view on beta carotene. Rheo would always say that carrots don’t contain
“vitamin A”; rather, they contain beta carotene, which is pro-vitamin A,and which has to be converted in the
liver into the “active” form of vitamin A. Therefore, Rheo argued, beta
carotene wasn’t necessary and that it was better to consume foods (e.g., liver)
with the active form of vitamin A already available. However, one day, I saw Rheo
reading some articles on beta carotene and so I asked him “Why are you
reading about beta carotene? You said the active vitamin A is superior.” Rheo
replied that, as it turns out, beta carotene may have benefits above and beyond
its vitamin A activity, most notably as a much more potent antioxidant than
vitamin A, with the capacity to quench the corrosive singlet-oxygen radical.
Additionally, not too long before Rheo passed away, he began to see the value
in consuming evening primrose seed oil and fish oil, studying up on the important
prostaglandins produced from these oils, and even introduced his own Evening
Primrose Oil and MaxEPA fish oil products. Although these products seem
inconsistent with Rheo’s reputed nutritional philosophy, what this showed was how non-dogmatic
Rheo was and that he was more interested in learning and doing whatever worked
than engaging in game of cognitive dissonance. Furthermore, this, I believe, is
why Rheo was able to deliver the best before-and-afters I’ve ever seen. Even
today, thirty years after his death, I don’t think there is an authentic
before-and after out there that comes close to the transformation Rheo achieved
in the case of Caroline Young (Let’s Live Magazine, August, 1967).

What I realized about Rheo was that he was absolutely not
some guy pushing his own narrow agenda to make a buck. In fact, Rheo always went
for the highest-quality and as a result the most expensive materials. But he
never got rich doing it, as some out there have claimed. In fact, he was always
in debt and had to work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, just to keep
paying his bills, which were prodigious. Rheo struck me as a man of integrity, a
very spiritual individual with a zest for life, someone who loved science, and
a holistic practitioner in every sense of the word who wanted to improve the
quality of people’s lives.And he
did. Like George Bailey in the 1946 classic It’s
a Wonderful Life – a movie Rheo truly loved, by the way – Rheo really did
touch the lives of so many people, and no doubt far more than he ever realized.
But unlike George Bailey, Rheo actually did make it out of that little town he
was desperate to get away from, and there are a whole lot of us thankful that
he did!

John O’Connor has a Bachelor’s Degree in Nutrition,
Dietetics, and Food Science and works for a dietary supplement company where
his duties include Quality Control, R&D, and Regulatory Compliance.

Information
found on Rheo H. Blair: The Book is meant for educational and
informational purposes only, and to motivate you to make your own health
care and dietary decisions based upon your own research and in
partnership with your health care provider. It should not be relied upon
to determine dietary changes, a medical diagnosis or courses of
treatment.

Click through the link to read a GREAT collection of articles on issues such as raw milk, fats, soy dangers and others -- all consistent with the philosophy and teachings of Rheo Blair. If he were with us, these are the kinds of articles he would be reading. Educate yourself!